Reputation Management Strategy

Have a client who has some negative news sites (high DA 90+) ranking 3rd and 4th for their brand name.

Articles are old from 2014 and 2010.

They want to decrease these articles in the search results.

They also have lots of positive articles about their company, bit lower DA (50-80) but still solid and they also have a linkedin profile.

Our strategy is to link to 5 of these positive articles, which are also on 1st and 2nd page on Google. And built about 5 links to each. With the anticipation these articles will build some page authority from link building and outrank those negative articles.

Is this a sound strategy? Is there anything else we can also be doing to outrank or even remove these negative articles from the search results?

The usual suggestion is to create good, positive buzz about the company and then get that buzz to overtake the negative stuff in SERPs aye. But...

Originally Posted by Novatronic

Our strategy is to link to 5 of these positive articles, which are also on 1st and 2nd page on Google. And built about 5 links to each. With the anticipation these articles will build some page authority from link building and outrank those negative articles.

How will you be building links to these pages? Do they already own the pages? Creating backlinks like this could get out out of one problem (negative reputation) and into another (Penguin/manual actions). And the way Penguin works, that idea might just be like a bandaid - fix the reputation problem for now, then have it come back again when/if Penguin devalues the links and the negative stuff reappears where it was before. Or it could be worse, it's hard to say.

The usual suggestion is to create good, positive buzz about the company and then get that buzz to overtake the negative stuff in SERPs aye. But...

How will you be building links to these pages? Do they already own the pages? Creating backlinks like this could get out out of one problem (negative reputation) and into another (Penguin/manual actions). And the way Penguin works, that idea might just be like a bandaid - fix the reputation problem for now, then have it come back again when/if Penguin devalues the links and the negative stuff reappears where it was before. Or it could be worse, it's hard to say.

I'm not an expert in this area though, others might have more to say.

These are web properties we don't own on major news sites, so there is no risk in penalty for us.

The links to these pages will vary from guest posts, forums, blog comments, all high quality and not spam.

There is already enough positive buzz, for every 2 negative articles about the company there are like 10 positive ones. But those 2 are very high in the SERP results, so we want to start moving the positive ones.

So you trim your focus to those 5 articles. You can build backlinks to those articles. You can promote those articles in most social media outlet. And then you can review those articles and find a way to create more articles based on or related to them.

Couple all of this with consistent good news updates from the company. That eventually will dilute the bad news. But if you sit around doing nothing (in terms of adding new content that's good) then you'll continuously have the same struggle.